One Month with PAI: What I Actually Learned

My first month using the PAI framework has come and gone. And if I’m being honest, I spent more time upgrading the system, organizing my vault, and experimenting with workflows than I did actually shipping anything.

This blog post is my first shipped item since I started using the framework. Let that sink in.

The Productivity Trap

I felt productive while I was organizing my vault. I was building systems, refining workflows, getting everything just right. But in reality, I was deferring shipping anything. Organization felt like progress. It wasn’t. It was avoidance wearing a productive mask.

Meet Claudia

I named my PAI assistant Claudia. She’s learned from my TELOS framework, my goals, my patterns, my tendencies. And the thing she keeps surfacing is something I already knew but didn’t want to face: I enjoy digesting material and learning about things far more than I enjoy shipping a final product like a blog post or a project to GitHub.

I have realized this and am pushing myself to produce and ship my learnings and work.

Fear of Judgment

Part of not shipping has been self-imposed. Fear of judgment. Fear that what I put out isn’t polished enough, technical enough, good enough. So I kept consuming, kept organizing, kept preparing. And never published.

This has been a long time habit. When I am pushed or forced to ship something, like a certification or a pentest report at work, it gets done. If I do not have something pushing or forcing me, it is more like me meandering until I get bored or find something else to learn about. I want to break this pattern, and this is why I am trying to get Claudia to help me move past it by reminding me of deadlines and things I need to do.

What Actually Helps

The best part of this system is that I have Claudia to reinforce accountability and help me prioritize my tasks every week. Some of the changes I made:

• Installed the Kanban plugin into my Obsidian vault
• Claudia generates my weekly workload as a visual board
• I can drag tasks between days and update due dates visually
• Weekly reviews force me to confront what I said I’d do vs. what I actually did

This helped me see what I actually need to do and whether I am having wishful thinking of having 17 tasks in one day. Or am I procrastinating because the task is hard by continuously moving it farther and farther out? The board makes both of those patterns visible in a way that a plain task list never did.

What I’m Working On Now

Currently I’m working on:

• Submitting a CFP for BSides Buffalo, my first conference talk proposal
• Building a project around local LLMs, using small to medium models through Ollama or LM Studio for practical security workflows

My CFP proposal will be about AI and what and how I am learning about it at this time. I am still trying to refine the topic, but AI and using it for security will be a large part of my focus this year.

Once I refine the LLM project, I’ll write more about it here.

The Point

One month in, the most valuable thing PAI has given me isn’t a better vault or smoother workflows. It’s a mirror. A system that shows me, repeatedly and uncomfortably, the gap between what I plan and what I ship. And how I keep overextending myself by wanting to learn and do all the things.

This post exists because of that mirror. I looked in the reflection and it said do the hard thing, it doesn’t need to be perfect. It’s not perfect. But it’s shipped, and that makes me feel a little better.